Cipher Mysteries

Somewhere during the last decade, historians picked up got the idea that history book publishers wanted to be pitched 'vertical' books about individual microsubjects, books that somehow try to recapitulate the last N-thousand years of human history as viewed through the narrow prism of, say, salt or swearing or codpieces. All of which somehow reminds me of the joke about the ...

Just a quick note on Voynich cipher cribs. Even though I've built up a fairly substantial set of (what I think are) reasonably pragmatic deductions about how Voynichese works, actually finding any way to use those to get at the rest has (perhaps unsurprisingly) proved difficult. To recap, I suspect that... "4o" steganographically codes for "lo" (and perhaps "la" as well, via some subtle letter formation ...

Giancarlo Truffa recently posted a link to the HASTRO-L mailing list that contains a mention of a surprising claim that Leonardo da Vinci apparently designed a telescope:- On page 59(b) of Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus appears this drawing. Bülent Atalay proposed in 2005 that it is Leonardo’s “telescope”. The page also contains a “study of light reflection of a concave mirror”. And ...

An intriguing email just arrived on Cipher Mysteries' virtual doormat: recent blog subscriber Anna Castriota (thanks for writing, Anna!) asks whether I think there is any sign of filigree in the Voynich Manuscript. Of course, as per normal with the VMs, the answer is a "tentative maybe". There are good grounds for believing that its author had been exposed to an eclectic range ...

Here's a quick Voynich Manuscript palaeographic puzzle for you. A couple of months ago, I discussed Edith Sherwood's suggestion that the third letter in the piece of marginalia on f116v was a Florentine "x", as per Leonardo da Vinci's quasi-shorthand. I also proposed that the topmost line there might have read "por le bon simon s..." Going over this again just ...

(1) A big hello to Rich SantaColoma as he emerges from the VMs "List Closet" into the bright(-ish) light of the blogosphere. His "New Atlantis Voynich Theory" blog sets out his basic stall - which is that, thanks to his "Nagging Sense of Newness" about the Voynich Manuscript, he harbours strong doubts that it is anywhere near as ...

A new day dawns, bringing with it a nice email from Augusto Buonafalce in response to my post on Leonardo da Vinci's 'x'-like abbreviation for 'ver' (as recently mentioned by Edith Sherwood). Augusto points out that if you remove ...

Poor old Roald Dahl, remembered more or less entirely for his plucky parentless pawpers propelled into beastly circumstances (but who somehow come good in the end). Apart from bookish Dahl completists patiently working their way through the library shelf to find hidden gems to read to their son/daughter (errrm... like me), whoever would end up reading Dahl's "Esio Trot"? It's a nice (if slightly mawkish, ...

Edith Sherwood recently posted up a webpage comparing one of Leonardo da Vinci's abbreviations with the third character on the Voynich Manuscript's back page. She says that this is an 'x' - a letter which doesn't appear in Italian, but which Leonardo often uses to denote "ver". Might she be right?...

I think you can split historical revisionists into two broad camps: (a) desperate mainstream historians looking outwards to fringe subjects for a reputation-making cash-cow book; and (b) clever writers on the fringes who appropriate the tropes and tools of history to construct a kind of literary outsider art that is (almost) indistinguishable from history. That is, revisionism is a church broad enough ...